Books
The lost America
by Rachel Morris
Until recently, American literary circles had Marilynne Robinson pegged as another Keri Hulme. Robinson was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner prize in 1982 for Housekeeping, an eerily beautiful novel about two sisters growing up in a forsaken Idaho town called Fingerbone. Over the next two decades, Robinson produced a non-fiction account of British nuclear waste disposal and a collection of essays, but no more novels. Then, while struggling with a piece of fiction, one of her minor characters suddenly claimed her attention. Two years later, Robinson finished Gilead, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this April.
Set in the sleepy Iowan town of Gilead in 1956, the novel takes the form of a letter from a dying 75-year-old pastor named John Ames to his six-year-old son. Ames intends to acquaint his child with his grandfather and great-grandfather, both also preachers and both named John Ames. Then his wayward godson returns to town, sending a bitter ripple through Ames’s reflections. This prodigal son figure prompts Ames to examine the murkier reaches of his conscience, and the letter unfolds into an extended meditation on faith and the limits of forgiveness.
Robinson does not noticeably resemble any other novelist writing in America today. Her style is unfashion-ably naturalistic, compared with feted postmodernists like Jonathan Safran Foer, whose new Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close intertwines narrative with, among other things, a photograph of mating tortoises. Robinson’s premise sounds inherently undramatic – the entire novel occurs within the interior world of a gentle, elderly man. Despite this, Gilead is utterly absorbing. The book’s strength derives mostly from the voice that Robinson conceives for Ames, who addresses his son in plain language infused with wonder at ordinary things. “I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly,” he writes. “I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.” Like Housekeeping, Gilead has the quality of hours of solitary thought, distilled into precise and tender prose.
But perhaps the most startling aspect of the novel is its depiction of race and religion in American society. Spun throughout Gilead is the history of a liberal Christian tradition that once defined the Midwest, but is now largely forgotten. Many Protestant settlers moved to Midwestern states in the early 19th century to halt the spread of slavery. They often integrated their towns and founded small, excellent colleges. Some churches embraced efforts at social reform, including the anti-slavery movement; the region was a critical junction on the underground railroad. Robinson has said that Gilead emerged partly in response to a “cultural amnesia” that has erased these facts from public memory.
Wisely, Robinson does not labour this point, but it is subtly embedded in Ames’s recollections. His fierce, pistol-carrying grandfather moves to Iowa to preach against slavery; he harbours slaves and abolitionists, and fights in the Civil War. However, Ames’s pacifist father opposes the conflict. During his lifetime, someone burns down the Negro church and its congregation drifts away. Towards the end of the novel, Ames – who reads Sartre and atheist German philosophers – is presented with a racial predicament of his own. He finds himself unable to respond with his grand-father’s bold idealism. Ames presumably dies just before the civil rights movement compelled the US to enforce the type of society that some Midwestern communities had envisaged 100 years earlier. These days in the US, the word “Midwest” has become a synonym for Wal-Mart and chronic obesity, while religion is mostly associated with the evangelical conservatives whose political power was recently glimpsed in the grotesque manoeuvring over Terri Schiavo. Robinson’s singularly lovely novel reminds us that this has not always been the case.
GILEAD, by Marilynne Robinson (Virago, $45).
